ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: April 2015

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION:
TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF ACM TANGIBLE, EMBEDDED AND EMBODIED INTERACTION (TEI)2016 February 14-17, 2016 in Eindhoven, The Netherlandshttp://tei-conf.org/

SUBMISSION DEADLINES

Papers: 02 August 2015

Studio/Workshops: 16 August 2015

Arts Track: 25 October 2015

Student Design Challenge: 25 October 2015

Graduate Student Consortium: 25 October 2015

Work in Progress: 25 October 2015

TANGIBLE, EMBEDDED AND EMBODIED INTERACTION

The work presented at TEI focuses on physical interaction with computing technology and addresses theories, design, user experience, interfaces and interaction, and technical development. The TEI conference has gained substantial visibility and activity over the past decade. It brings together researchers, practitioners, designers, businesses, artists and students from various disciplines, including tangible computing, physical computing, IT product design, appliance design, whole body interaction, speculative design, gestural interaction, embodied interaction, responsive architecture, and responsive and interactive environments and spaces. Application areas are diverse, including: learning; planning; automotive, fashion, furniture and architectural design; music and sound creation; public art and performance; games; as well as productivity and creativity tools in a wide range of domains.

The intimate size of this single-track conference provides a unique forum for exchanging ideas and presenting innovative work through talks and demonstrations, participating in hands-on studio/workshops, and through posters, art installations and performances. We invite submissions from all of these perspectives: theoretical, conceptual, technical, applied, or artistic.

Accepted submissions of all types will be included in the ACM digital library proceedings.

TEI’16

At TEI’16 we celebrate the conference’s 10th anniversary. We see this moment as a perfect opportunity for recalling some of our founding values and complementing these with contemporary values, for re-emphasizing the relationship between interactive products and systems and the body, and for learning from each other’s approaches and rationales. At TEI’16 we wish to celebrate our trans-disciplinarity by creating a setting where all of us can learn not only from our similarities, but perhaps even more from our variety. Through a wide palette of work ranging from highly technical to highly artistic, and from highly applied to highly conceptual or theoretical, we wish to trigger discussion and reflection, with the aim of emphasizing what binds us.

To do this we have established the theme ‘Our Body Is Our Manual’. Our main motivations for this are:

By reemphasizing our embodiment we can have a unique perspective in the HCI and related communities on contemporary developments including social design, systems design, sustainability and more.

As the interactions we propose in our products and systems are aimed to inform our embodied selves, we should also allow ourselves to be informed by our bodies when designing and researching these interactions.

Focusing on our embodiment allows us a perspective on our work other than ‘field of application’.

At TEI’16 we aim for a conference that stimulates our signature transdisciplinary dialog on multiple levels, providing a conference that is more than the sum of its parts. This means that at TEI’16, the different aspects (e.g., the papers track, the studios, etcetera) will not be experienced in isolation but rather as an integrated experience.

[This VR technology, easier than most for content producers to adopt, makes the user “[f]eel like you’re in a luxury box with friends at your favorite sporting event”; the story is from Road to VR and includes more images. –Matthew]

While other companies are busy building 360 degree camera rigs and hoping for consumer adoption, VR startup LiveLike has a unique approach which uses existing broadcast camera tech in a surprisingly effective way to make you feel like you’re in a luxury box with friends at your favorite sporting event.

Right after gaming, VR video (360 degree recording) is the next biggest platform for VR content production. But the market is still early and has yet to prove what will be the best way to direct, record, edit, produce, and distribute VR video content.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is being touted as “the next technological revolution” and one that will be “the most potentially disruptive ” we will see in our lifetime, surpassed only by the World Wide Web and universal mobile connectivity [1, p. 24]. It involves real – world, physical objects with embedded computational and networking capabilities communicating and interacting with one another, with other computing devices, as well as with users on the global Internet. With the advent and growth of the IoT, homes, workplaces, and educational institutions – even entire cities and countries – are becoming increasingly ” smart ” and interconnected, which promises to substantially enhance or change the ways in which we live, play, work, and learn.

Amid the rise of the IoT, we have also been witnessing advances in wearable computing and electronic technologies that have made possible the creation of the “Internet of Me” [2]. Such technologies have now entered the mainstream [3] and products powered by them are becoming increasingly available on the mass market, with consumer – level devices like smart glasses (e.g., Google Glass, Microsoft HoloLens), smart watches (e.g., Apple Watch), smart clothes, fitness bands/activity trackers (e.g., Fitbit, Nike+ FuelBand), and head – mounted cameras (e.g., GoPro) regularly dominating the technology news headlines of late. These technologies and devices along with others still being developed are able to augment human cognition, behavior, and interactions in powerful ways that were previously inconceivable.

It is clear that wearable technologies and the IoT hold much potential for and have many possible applications in education and training [4], [5]. While they have garnered considerable attention and interest in this sector [6] – [9] , however, there continues to be a dearth of real scholarship surrounding their use for learning, teaching, and assessment, the majority of published work to date consisting largely of anecdotal reports or being focused primarily on the technology. This themed special issue of IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies will seek to address this gap by publishing a combination of theoretical/conceptual and empirical articles that contribute to the building of a rigorous evidence base aimed at guiding and supporting practice in addition to inspiring and informing future research and development in this rapidly emerging and evolving area. Submissions that go beyond technical descriptions or “show and tell” to engage deeply with pertinent questions and issues relating to pedagogical and learning design as well as those that systematically examine the efficacy of tools, methods, and approaches in improving learning are especially encouraged. Multidisciplinary studies are particularly welcome.

[A promising expansion of telepresence robotic technology is described in this article from IEEE Spectrum, which includes another image and two videos; for much more information see the DORA website. –Matthew]

DORA Telepresence Robot Gives You Fully Immersive Experience

By Evan Ackerman
Posted 28 Apr 2015

Remote presence robots, as the name implies, act as your stand-in at a distant location, letting you move around and see and hear through a robotic surrogate. Spaceagencies, researchers, and the military have developed high-end telepresence systems that offer an immersive experience, but these units can cost millions of dollars. Consumer telepresence robots (like the Double or Beam), on the other hand, cost much less but can’t create a sense of immersion—you’re staring at a video feed on a computer screen, after all.

Now a team of roboticists at the University of Pennsylvania is using affordable sensors and actuators and virtual reality technologies like Oculus Rift to build a platform that offers the same capabilities of a high-end telepresence system at a reasonable cost. DORA (Dexterous Observational Roving Automaton) attempts to bring true immersion to teleoperated robots, by precisely tracking the motion of your head in all six degrees of freedom and then duplicating those motions on a real robot moving around the real world. Their goal is making the experience so immersive that, while operating the robot at a remote place, you’ll forget thatyou’re not actually there. Read more on DORA Telepresence Robot gives you fully immersive experience…

Creative Gaming (CG2015) is an academic conference exploring creative gaming, playful interactivity and serious games which will be held at the Auckland University of Technology on 8 September 2015. CG2015 is being hosted by The School of Art and Design, PIGsty (The Play, Interaction and Games Lab) and Colab Creative Technologies Research Institute at AUT.

The conference will address the following questions: What is creative gaming? What are the trends in creative gaming? How can games be used to promote creativity or allow playful activities that encourage critical thinking? How is creative gaming being used to support wellbeing? How can we encourage creativity through game production?

The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners across all areas of play, games and human-computer interaction. The goal of this first conference is to highlight and foster discussion about current high quality research in creative gaming as foundations for the future of playful interactivity and serious games.

Submission types:

an abstract up to a maximum of 300 words outlining the scope of a paper to be presented at the conference

a 100 word abstract for a poster

a 100 word proposal for a game or installation to be presented at the conference.

[Perspectives on the future of VR in architecture and more generally from designer and visualizer Olivier Demangel (I especially like this from near the end: “[P]erhaps you could have an empty room in your future house dedicated to VR? You could choose a different interior every day, like the Star Trek holodeck”). The interview is from Dezeen, where it includes lots of pictures, most comparing ‘real’ photos of a specific house with virtual versions, along with 3 videos. –Matthew]

Every architect will soon design using 3D goggles, according to designer and visualiser Olivier Demangel, who believes that virtual architecture will be as convincing as the real thing within five years.

Demangel, who works for London 3D imaging company IVR NATION, contacted Dezeen to show us a virtual reality model he’d created of a house featured on our website four years ago.

“In the Ty Hedfan demo you can open the doors and turn on the lights,” he said. “You can instantly change materials for the walls, the floor, the position of lights. Interactivity means you can experiment with a lot of different options — design, materials, lighting, weather — very quickly.”

The designer created a series of walk-through movies of the house, which are shown here, but said you need to don an Oculus Rift 3D headset to really understand how convincing the virtual model is.

“It’s hard to describe if you have never tried 3D goggles like Oculus Rift but it’s really a full immersion,” he said. “Your brain is completely tricked.”

He added: “I asked some architect friends to test the Oculus Rift with Ty Hedfan and they couldn’t describe how fantastic the experience was. They didn’t expect it at all.”

Demangel predicts that architects and designers will be designing using VR tools within a few years and sending clients virtual models of their projects so they can walk through them wearing a 3D headset.

“We could expect an empty room with positional tracking dedicated to VR in every architecture practice, for testing new designs,” he added.

When asked whether virtual architecture would ever be more convincing than real architecture, Demangel replied: “There is no doubt in my mind about that. I used to say that when VR tech matures, it’s going be more powerful than cocaine.”

He added: “Probably the two main problems will be addiction and isolation. You are going to be able to experience The Matrix for real.”

[This raises all kinds of possibilities for presence experiences… it’s from The Creators Project, where the story includes more images and a 3:14 minute video. For more information see coverage in The Next Web and the xxArray Kickstarter page. –Matthew]

When you boot up GTA V, do you play as Michael, Trevor, or Franklin? Soon that may not matter, thanks to Alexx Henry’s new “3D scanner for the masses,” the xxArray, which uses 90 DSLR cameras to create a hyperreal, 22 gigapixel digital model of a person in seconds. A few lines of code later, Henry suggests, and the new, digital you can be hustling through Los Santos or any number of famous digital locales, using your own hands, feet, and face, accurate to the very pore.

Within the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Human-Robot Interaction, there has been a strong upsurge of interest in the more personal aspects of human relationships with artificial partners in the last few years. This upsurge has not only been apparent amongst the general public, as evidenced by an increase in coverage in the print media, TV documentaries and feature films, but also within the academic community.

The Second International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots is inviting the submission of full papers or extended abstract to its symposium to be held in conjunction with the 12th Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE) conference in Iskandar, Malaysia.

[An interesting example of the use of presence to inform and persuade; this is from Road to VR, where the story includes more images and two videos; more details and previews are available from Western River Expeditions. –Matthew]

[Image: 360 Labs’ waterproof 360º GoPro array by partner Freedom360]

360 Film Aims to Save Majesty of Grand Canyon Using the Power of VR, Kickstarter Now Live

The untouched beauty of the Grand Canyon has inspired poets, novelists, film makers, and more than 4 million recreational visitors per year to make their way to the dramatic cliffs that border the Colorado River basin. 360 Labs aims to preserve that legacy with a new 360 degree documentary that will go into the heart of the canyon that is currently in danger of being forever changed by a new construction project. Read more on 360 film aims to save majesty of Grand Canyon using the power of VR…